At First Sight. Tamara Sneed
he replied, grinning at Kendra and Quinn. Or, more appropriately, grinning at their breasts, which were pushed forward for his display. Charlie narrowed her eyes as each woman pressed a kiss against his cheek and Graham didn’t seem to mind.
“You were very brave to take on that awful man,” Quinn cooed. “He could have killed you.”
Before Graham could respond, Kendra asked, “What in the world possessed you to take on that freak of nature? If you want to wrestle with someone, all you have to do is say the word. I’ll even let you win.”
Graham laughed, while Quinn glowered and Charlie gripped the hammer a little tighter. Graham stared across the yard at Charlie for the first time. His smile instantly disappeared.
“Charlie, that ladder doesn’t look steady,” he said, gruffly. “Get down from there before you break your neck.”
Charlie gritted her teeth at the flash of anger. Kendra and Quinn got grins and kisses, while she got a dismissive order. She had been killing herself all morning, trying to make the house remotely habitable while her sisters had sat on their butts, and they got Graham’s smiles and she got an order? She suddenly wanted to slap his too-perfect face.
“I’ve been on this ladder all afternoon. It’s fine,” she responded stiffly then turned back to the house.
Except she turned too fast. Suddenly, the ladder was wobbling and Charlie was wobbling. Her stomach sank as she realized that she was about to fall and break something. She dropped the hammer to hang onto the ladder with both hands, but instead her shifting weight caused the ladder to tilt farther to one side. She screamed as the ladder balanced on one stem for a moment then began to fall. She was propelled into the air.
But instead of hitting the porch, Charlie slammed into a just-as-hard but distinctly fleshy surface. Graham. Before they hit the ground, Graham’s strong arms wrapped around her and he twisted so that he hit the porch first, taking the brunt of the fall. She slammed onto his body, as the ladder fell harmlessly to one side. Just when she thought the worst had passed, she felt the spread of thick, warm paint spreading across her back and neck and, unfortunately, onto Graham, who was beneath her.
Silence covered the porch after the screams and collapse. Charlie did not want to open her eyes, but she did and stared straight into Graham’s enraged expression. His face, neck and shirt were covered with white paint, which looked ridiculously funny.
Charlie knew it would only make matters worse, but a giggle slipped past her lips. Graham’s eyes narrowed at her bubbling laughter and that instantly terminated all of her amusement.
She tried to scramble off him, and, instead, accidentally dug her elbow into his stomach. He winced in pain.
“Charlie, you’re killing him,” Quinn cried, running up onto the porch.
“Sorry,” she said, frantically, as Quinn and Kendra practically pulled her away to get to Graham. Charlie felt a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach as Graham, with paint dripping off him, limped to the railing of the porch.
“Do you need water or something?” Kendra asked, wiping paint off his face, which only worked to smear it into a war-paint decoration á la Braveheart cowboy.
“I think she knocked the breath out of you when you two went down,” Quinn said, worriedly, then asked Kendra, “Should we call an ambulance?”
Graham ignored her sisters and kept his laser gaze on Charlie. She picked up one of her discarded rags on the porch and hesitantly approached him. She moved to wipe paint off his arm, but he abruptly snatched the rag from her hand. He was more angry than she had thought, and that made her angry. Accidents happened. They seemed to happen more often when he was around, but it was just an accident.
“You’re a menace, lady,” he abruptly declared. “An honest-to-God menace. You could have killed yourself.”
“It was an accident,” she shot back through clenched teeth. After all, she was covered in paint, too. It would take her an hour to wash the paint out of her hair.
“Was last night an accident?” he shot back. “At the rate you’re going, I’ll be dead in another week.”
“What happened last night?” Kendra asked, surprised.
Neither Charlie nor Graham spared her a glance. Charlie informed Graham, icily, “I didn’t ask for your help last night. And I didn’t ask for your help now.”
Graham’s mouth flapped open in disbelief and outrage, and Charlie inwardly cursed because, even covered in paint and acting like an ogre, the man made her knees weak.
“You were about to run screaming into the night before I showed up,” he growled through clenched teeth.
“I don’t run from anything, including men like Earl McPhee or men like you. I dealt with Max Sibley for twenty-eight years. Believe that dealing with you two is a piece of cake,” she retorted.
His nostrils flared in anger as he said in a low and dangerous tone, “Are you actually comparing me to Earl McPhee?”
“Of course not,” she said, annoyed. “But, I didn’t ask you to step in last night, and I didn’t ask you to step in just now.”
Graham snorted in disbelief then threw the rag on the porch. He cast a quick glance at her sisters and said tightly, “Kendra and Quinn, always a pleasure.”
He shot Charlie another venom-filled look then stormed off the porch. He climbed into his truck and slammed the door so hard that Charlie briefly wondered if the glass would break. The truck kicked up dirt as it fishtailed then righted before Graham sped from the yard.
Tears coated Charlie’s eyes, and she blamed it on her stinging elbow that she had bumped on the ladder on her way down. Graham’s obvious dislike for her had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Quinn and Kendra suddenly moved in front of her, with identical expressions of murder on their faces.
“If you’ve run off Graham, I will never forgive you,” Quinn announced, then gingerly stepped over the paint puddles to walk into the house.
“Do you have to do everything in your power to alienate the one decent-looking man in this town?” Kendra asked, angrily. “I’m not even going to ask what happened last night because I don’t want to know, but you better make this right, Charlie. If I have to spend the next two weeks with just you two for company, things are going to get real unpleasant around here.”
Kendra jogged off the porch and down the road. Charlie sighed then looked at the paint-splattered porch. She should have stayed in L.A. She didn’t belong here. That much was clear.
Graham sped down the highway towards Bentonville. After his detour to the Sibley house, and then the return trip to his house to shower and change, he was running an hour late to pick up Theo from the local airport in Bentonville. Graham had turned off his cell phone fifty miles back after Theo’s sixth call demanding to know where he was. Theo and his Armani suits would not be able to tolerate the Bentonville airport for long, although airport was too nice a term for the one-room building with three chairs and a counter for the guard, Old Man Harris, to sit at and read the paper.
Graham knew exactly who to blame for the complaining he would have to endure from Theo during the one-hour drive back to Sibleyville. Charlie Sibley. He had not been exaggerating. The woman was a menace. Practically every time he was around her, he ended up with a bruise somewhere.
Graham refused to feel the slightest bit of guilt as her hurt expression swam through his mind. Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have screamed at her, but his heart had leaped into his throat when he had seen her balancing on a wooden ladder as old as he was. Graham had stopped at their house to ask them to dinner that night, but he had gotten distracted by Charlie. First, he had noticed her very nice-looking legs in a pair of shorts, then he had noticed her obvious plan to break those gorgeous legs. He had envisioned her tumbling from the ladder and breaking her neck, and that thought had shaken him, which had made him more curt than usual. And then the little